Jew-hating, misogynistic Boston College sports fans
Michael Pahre provides the details:
In a series of recent postings at online forums and a discussion group, fans of Boston College athletics have repeatedly used anti-semitic and misogynistic language directly at a Brighton resident and community activist. The language has also included the suggestion of violence towards her. ...
Complete with examples. He says a BC official, while emphasizing the college has nothing to do with the forums, apologized for the language at a meeting this week of a college/community task force looking at BC's expansion plans.
One forum particpant reacted quickly to Pahre's post:
We may want to clean up our act since these interwebs are being monitored now.
Comments
Looks like they're trying to
Looks like they're trying to blow something up bigger then it really is.
A public forum of thousands, with hundreds of topics and threads, and they're cherry picking what some anonymous poster said in three or four posts? Then a few emails by some individuals?
Fark.com is a thousand times worse and is monitored by admins, for example.
This really isn't helping to make these community chosen activists appear as reasonable, respectable people. And with the history of neighborhood associations blocking any development that's in their back yard, just to keep the status quo, I can see how many people are frustrated across the city. I really don't see how these comments can also be seen as blatant anti-Semitic attacks, although they are in very bad taste.
Should they call them out for the crash postings, and point to their immaturity? Hell yes.
Should they jump on the hate speech bandwagon and try to make this a huge deal? Um no..
I tend to agree
Those comments are heinous and disgusting, but tying them to Boston College as an institution is simply not justified. You can find hateful online trolls advocating for every cause under the son. Even tolerance! Saying that the person those idiots support need to answer for those offenses is frankly Fox News nonsense. Trolls are trolls and every site has them. The guilt by association effort from Pahre is simply unfair. What was done was wrong, but it wasn't done BY Boston College and may very well not have even been done by members of the Boston College community. There are simply sports fans who root for the areas only big time college program even if they never went to BC. Even the idiots who are posting on these sites represent a small fraction of the Boston College sports fans and an even smaller fraction of the BC Community in general.
Furthermore, his suggested remedy is absurd. Instead of asking for the school's help in identifying the people who posted those stupid comments on these sites, he's suggesting the school block access entirely to all students and staff. Because one troll posted something, an academic institution should ban its community for visiting a site that largely discusses other topics? So, if some troll posts something at UHub, BC should block access to it, too? How about imdb.com? Some really dumb and hateful things get posted there. Should students not have access to it? How about Craigslist? If his logic were extended, the school couldn't allow access to anything.
If IP numbers were tracked from those posts and come from computers on BC's network, the school should work to track them down. And I will say anyone who posted it should be fired or expelled if they are a part of the school. They don't belong at Boston College and as an alumni, I'd expect the school would take action against genuine hate speech and intimidation. Using some idiots as a cudgel in their fight against BC, though, is unfair. Idiots are idiots and there is simply no reasonable way to make other people take responsibility for what idiots say. If identified, BC can disipline them. BC can disavow them, which they DID do. But they can't be held accountable for them. That's just not honest.
If the people making these hateful comments
If the people making these hateful comments are in the minority, which they may very well be, then the school should make the necessary efforts and take the necessary steps of tracking these students down and making sure that things like this don't happen again. Students and residents of the area should feel safe and free to get an education without feeling under attack due to their religion, race or gende or whatever.
Not necessarily students
The people who made these message board comments aren't necessarily students. Anyone can post to these boards whether or not they have any affiliation with BC.
"If" is the key word
You're right, and that's clearly a reason that blaming the school for this is completely off-base. But IF the webmasters running these sites want to share the IP addresses of the hateful posts with the school and IF they are actually BC IP addresses, then I hope BC will take appropriate action. But yes, the key word is "if". We don't know if they are alumni or even just sports fans.
I went to the site, and it was clearly a group of self-satisfied jerks. Still, its just unfair to use a small group of idiots and fashion them as the face of the opposition for the Brighton home-owners. Its a bunch of idiots in front of computers. There is sadly no shortage of them on the internets and if we are all going to be blamed when some idiot "agress" with us, we're all going to have to get banned.
So what's the answer?
First, you're right, there's no proof these are students. However, I'd argue these ARE local people, because only local people would know about the whole expansion issue, including the names of people on the homeowner side.
Having said that, yeah, jerks are jerks, but they have a way of festering if you just say "oh, those are jerks." A long time ago, in a career far, far away, I covered a town (not so very far away, actually) where punks kept vandalizing a temple. Temple members kept quiet and pleaded with the really local paper to keep the police-blotter items about the vandalism out of the paper because they didn't want to cause any trouble and thought the kids would grow out of it.
Guess what? They didn't. They just got bolder and bolder, until one year, some darling thuglings, proud sons of the upper-middle class professionals who live in that town, spent a couple hours completely destroying the sukkah - a hand-built structure put up to celebrate the fall harvest festival of Sukkot.
THEN, finally, temple members did something - and went public. It all turned out to be one of those inter-denominational kumbayah things, but the net result was the vandalism stopped.
So, OK, maybe banning access to these sites on campus isn't the answer, but simply ignoring them isn't, either.
but thats where the police
but thats where the police need to get invloved.
And if these kids are desecrating one religion, why would a inter-denominational kumbayah stop them? It really just sounds like they did grow out of those things, helped by the fact that it was now all over the police blotters, and the police were looking for them.
Destruction of property isn't the same as calling someone a bad name, or making a nasty remark on the tubes.
My point
Sorry for not making it more clearly, is that if you do nothing now, eventually you could wind up with something more serious happening.
Oh I got the point, and I
Oh I got the point, and I agree.
But the post to me seems to be trying to frame this as a hate crime, a very very serious hate crime, reported by very very serious and important people.
It's just laughable, trying to force the university to start blocking internet traffic at the request of two individuals.
They should have pointed it out, but taken it for what it was, a bunch of trolls trolling.
If there's something serious in this, contact the police and the police will take care of it. Other then that, point out that some anonymous posters are making racially/religious inappropriate remarks over that the forum, and let the moderators know about the trolling. See what they can do first.
Don't try to make this some huge media culpa, because it's not, and I'm sure these activists have more pressing and important issues to attend to then what some 15yr hockey fan posted whith his giggiling friends.
Your story, though...
Shows how the "just ignore it" mindset is so dominant in our society. I agree with you. When I see a troll at a forum I frequent, I'll take them on. As long as their inappropriate behavior is available to be read, a verbal beat down of them should be seen, too.
But that's not our culture and I understand that even if I don't agree with it. Particularly online, the overwhelming response is to ignore it until a moderator makes it go away or the troll leaves on their own. *I* have been banned from multiple sites for refuting troll posts because this often the official position. People are quicker to condemn someone for taking on a troll's hatred than the hatred itself. I don't like it, but I've learned I can't hold a forum responsible if a troll's post goes ignored. I've learned that it isn't an endorsement, but rather quite the opposite. That's why blaming all of Boston College for what only a couple people did and what only a few dozen may have even seen and ignored isn't fair. Its a completely outrageous overreach in assigning responsibility
In that case, blaming the school isn't off-base.
If, indeed, the school (i. e. BC) does have any sort of connection to these people running the offensive sites, then the school should take some sort of disciplinary action on such people.
Not necessarily students
You will notice that, in the original blog posting, I used the broader term "Boston College community," not "BC students."
Casual inspection of the websites indicates that, where identifying information of any kind is provided, many -- if not most -- of the posters seem to have some kind of affiliation to the school. Those affiliations can be as current students, alumni, or employees. Thee posters are, after all, on the website because they are fans of BC athletics. Hence the term "Boston College community."
There are also bound to be people posting to the discussion boards who have no affiliation whatsoever to BC. My gut feeling, however, is that the posters are dominated by alumni, not current students or unaffiliated people, but I have no quantitative evidence to back up that assertion.
Gut feelings
A gut feeling is just a gut feeling. And even if most of the posters are alumni, which I'd obvious agree with, it does nothing to identify the specific individuals who posted this garbage OR even the individuals who read that thread. But maybe they are just local sports fans. A lot of people follow Boston College athletics without being students, employees, or alumni. I wouldn't call them the Boston College community. This isn't "Red Sox Nation", here. BC is university and its "community" has a specific meaning. It doesn't include Division I sports fans.
There is no way to know what connection these idiots have with the school. Even if they are alumni, all you've done is discover that a college has some reactionary idiots in their alumni community. Like every other school everywhere. Harvard, too, though theirs tend to be pundits and policy makers rather than internet trolls.
Every school has these idiots. Every neighborhood. Every cause, ideology, and religion. To be sure, there is a critical mass than can be reached when you start questioning why a group has so many jerks or why they are allowed to be so loud. That threshold isn't remotely met here. We're talking What happened was wrong, but using it to attack Boston College just isn't a fair reaction. We're talking about a couple people who did something wrong, and maybe a dozen or two others who saw and egged it on. That is such a minute fraction of the BC Community that to treat it as a representative sample is blatantly unfair. If any group, institution, or website was held accountable for whatever any idiot said in its name, then we'd all spend our lives answering for the crimes of idiots who somehow, someway, agree with us about something.
If some kid from Brighton goes onto BC's campus and kicks over a statue, does it mean Brighton needs to be held responsible for his actions? Does it mean Brighton as a community allowed it to happen because he planned his vandalism on streets frequented by members of the Brighton community? No. It means some idiot kid lives in Brighton. That's all.
You can't spell "Bigoted
You can't spell "Bigoted Catholics" without BC.
That's as equally lame and
That's as equally lame and insulting as what those posters said.
BC? Hmmph.
As a JEW with a graduate degree from BC, I can assure you that anti-semtic incidents and comments were not unusual within the student body (who were amongst the most provincial morons I've ever encountered). Also popular were anti-female, anti-black, anti-gay, and anti-asian comments.
I'm not the least bit surprised by this posting.
In all seriousness, I had a
In all seriousness, I had a roommate in college who was Jewish and we are good friends. He would make jew jokes all the freaking time, both funny, and sometimes funny yet in poor taste.
I did too, but then again i never found fault with making fun of my Italian heritage.
Is this acceptable behavior, or is it a Chris Rock sorta thing?
Because sometimes I think people to lower their walls, lower their guard just a little, and see when stupid shit is just that
Lower my walls?
Why don't you raise your IQ?
I don't think the carefully calculated and orchestrated murder of 6 million of my forefathers really merits joking.